The X-Project

Emma, Haller and Rachel focus on trying to find Jean.



Just standing in the chamber left him feeling exposed. The vaulting ceiling and blank white panels gave the mind nothing to focus on. He wondered if it was by design. Probably, he suspected. Distraction would defeat the purpose.

Right now Jim would have given the world for a distraction.

The room's other occupant stood at the edge of the walkway in silence. Like him, she wasn't looking at anything in particular. Nothing but the world inside her mind.

"Rachel?"

"Hmmm?" Her inquiring hum in response was belated and faint, sounding like it had come from a distance away. She gave no other indication that she had heard him, her stillness unnatural even in their stark surroundings. It was followed by a long protracted silence and an empty beat before she blinked and tilted her head slightly in his direction, every motion seeming to require deliberation and effort. "What's up, bro?"

"You're quiet." Something about Cerebro's construction drank any possible reverberations from the loaded statement. While it didn't carry the same triteness of asking the question outright, the clear implication was "Are you okay?"

If Rachel read his underlying concern, she made no indication of it as she shrugged lightly, turning vacant green eyes back towards the equally blank panels. He hadn’t said much on the way in either, she could have pointed out. But although they were standing a mere few feet from each other, it was as though there were miles and a thousand-foot drop separating the two – a single misstep could send either of them careening off the edge and into the abyss.

“Just thinking.” She made a vague, abortive gesture at the headset between them. “My telepathy is whacked, I’m not sure if I can help.”

"Yeah, mine too. It'll be okay. We're not the ones who'll be doing most of the work." He tilted his head to catch her green eyes with his blue and brown. "You know that's not what I meant, kiddo," he said softly.

Her blank soldier's mask wavered slightly -- a mere tightening at the corners of her eyes -- before it smoothed out again. "I'll be fine. I just hate waiting."

Jim's own expression didn't flicker. Fine. Yes, of course. She was fine. After the destruction of Muir Island. After failing to have even a chance to prevent it. After losing her parents for what, to her, was the second time. For a single mad instant the older man almost forced the point when something stopped him.

Because your intentions would be pure, wouldn't they? whispered a poisonous little voice in the back of his mind. You wouldn't be trying to push her because it keeps you from thinking about how fine you are, now would you?

The door to the chamber whispered open, the slightest change of air pressure and silence, broken suddenly by the harsh click-click of Emma's heeled boots, a purposeful march. "Well," she said, stopping in front of the chair below Cerebro's interface. "It appears it's up to us. Someone needs to find Jean and it appears we've been delegated." She looked at the interface and quivered slightly in distaste. "Cerebro isn't even close to my favourite toy at the best of times, and this is hardly the best of times. But, let me guess, neither of you wants to be lead rider in the charge into the Astral Plane, either?"

Jim rubbed the back of his head, trying to disguise his relief at Emma's appearance. "We're both working with handicaps," he conceded. "Rachel's telepathy was damaged when she was pulled out of the astral plane. Mine twisted in during the developmental stage, so I can't usually receive without making an effort. Diving into Cerebro alone would probably make my head explode. We've got power between us, but . . ." The words "Usually this would be Jean's job" hung unspoken and obvious between the three of them.

Emma’s smile was a cold twist of her lips. “If it ever came down to brute strength, I’m fairly certain both Jean and Charles would be able to annihilate me. But I can promise you, there is no-one better at working with telepaths with “handicaps”.” She reached out a hand and touched Cerebro’s control panel lightly. “I know it doesn’t tend to come easily to telepaths, but I would ask only that you trust me and you do everything you can to keep your shields down while we do this. If you can do that, I can find a way to work around the damage and access what I need. It will just be easier if I can concentrate on the search and not having to keep shoring up our interface.”

"Yes, ma'am," Rachel said, moving away from the edge of the walkway and closer to the control panel. She was all business and grim determination now, mission parameters giving all of them something more important to focus on than internal breakdowns and insidious thoughts. "I'm ready when you are."

Emma raised an eyebrow at Jim, accepted his silent nod as an indication that he was also ready. With the slightest shiver of distaste she touched the control panel to set everything in motion, lowered herself into Cerebro's chair and waited as the interface lowered itself onto her head. The jolt as she let her mind expand into Cerebro's sphere (and expand and expand and expand, a dizzying whirl of sensation and falling into minds and touching everything and STOP!) and then draw herself away from that and back into the room, was startling. With an unvoiced ~I hate that~ echoing only inside her own head, she reached out to Jim, pleased to note the courtesy of dropped shields, and tapped lightly at his telepathic centre. ~Ready?~ she asked.

In response, the burden of maintaining the interface was taken completely from Emma's hands and into Jim's. Her mind was as he remembered it from Genosha: clear and precise, like the crystalline structures that composed her diamond form. In contrast, Rachel's mind was like a solitary patch of clear sky in a cloudy day. Trouble lay beyond, but determination and purpose cut through everything like a shaft of sunlight. Jim flooded his power through her own and carried both into Emma. In the same way crystals flourished in water and heat, her natural structures drew strength from the active influx of energy. This, at least, he could do.

It had been Jean and Nathan he'd first done this with, he realized, but there was no room for grief or bitterness here, and the thought passed with barely a ripple.

~I have this,~ he replied. ~Whenever you're ready.~

The weight of maintaining the interface lifted from her mind, Emma reached carefully into the deep well of power that Jim had so easily carried to her. She took a moment to sift and sample what was offered, making sure she could identify each participant easily and bring them in or out of the search as needed or as their “handicap” demanded. Once she was comfortable with what she was doing, Emma took a deep mental breath and tapped deeply into their combined telepathic strengths and sent it into Cerebro.

Emma’s mind expanded, buttressed by the additional powers loaned so freely to her, and kept expanding. It was dizzying at first, rushing outwards so rapidly, sifting so easily through a million minds, running through her hands like grains of sand on the beach. As always, the initial rush was replaced with a feeling of nausea, quickly suppressed, and then the helplessness of trying to deal with such a crushing amount of data. Emma gave herself an angry mental shake and quickly reset her mental landscape to filter and divide the information she was receiving.

~I doubt Jean will be out in the open, but that’s our first task,~ Emma said to Jim and Rachel. ~You both know her mental signature – I can take all of this,~ her mental wave encompassed all of the data that was coming in from Cerebro, ~and divide it into three. Are you comfortable with doing a skim-read of it as I send it to you and see if Jean is hiding in plain sight?~

~Yes,~ Rachel said shortly, slightly awed at being able to grasp and wield her telepathy again. ~It's like riding a bicycle.~

Jim's reply was a half-beat behind Rachel's, delayed by a sickening sense of telepathic agoraphobia. He'd never had a fraction of the sensitivity he could feel Emma channeling.

He felt something like a hand on his shoulder: Jack, the one who always made him face uncomfortable truths. Can't hide behind skirts and stilettos forever, said the voice in the back of his mind.

Jim took a deep breath. ~Yes,~ he echoed. ~I'm ready.~

Emma's response was the slightest touch of reassurance in their minds and then she opened her mind to the entirety of the data coming in through Cerebro. Without filtering it, she split it into three streams, feeding it outwards and into the psychic centres she held within her care. Those two streams she left unread, a raw rush of millions of minds going past her, while concentrating her own thoughts on the third stream. Like diamonds in dross, mutant minds went past her, and she filtered them out of the feed, discarding the billions of minds that Cerebro deemed uninteresting and letting her mind skim over the remainder. This sweep was deeper than the first, but barely, looking only to see if there was a match for Jean's telepathic signature in the minds she scanned. It was unlikely that Jean would be in plain sight, but who knew what was happening in the mind of a woman who may just have slaughtered two million people. Perhaps she was standing on the telepathic equivalent of a mountaintop and screaming her name into the wind and waiting to to be found. Emma could only hope.

In the moments before she was flooded by the stream directed at her, Rachel neatly siphoned off a thread of Emma's powers to fill the gaps in her shredded telepathy. Then everything hit her all at once, an immense wash of sensation that she did not struggle against, choosing instead to immerse herself completely within the tidal wave of consciousness that rushed past her presence as though she were soaking in the middle of a tsunami.

Hand to her heart, Rachel had missed this feeling of control over her own mind, never mind that she had no say in the face the enormity of Cerebro's capabilities. She broadened the range of her sweep with an ease that stemmed from years of training, flitting fleetingly through the rapids of minds and trusting that she would know if she had found Jean.

Jim tried to calm himself against the flood of minds. If you stood firm against it the pressure would break you, he realized, and so the answer was to bend. Minds streamed past him like leaves in a fall gale. Like a reed in the wind.

Yet he was puzzled. The astral plane was enormous, that was true, but in India Jean had shown herself capable of a massive display of power -- she was burning hot and bright, and someone like that shouldn't have been hard to find. Now and then a passing mind brought him close enough to feel an old eddy of power, but that was psychic residue. Had she become so strong she could mask herself even from Cerebro?

Then, suddenly, he sensed a familiar warmth. Not by the new scar in India, but a different one, an older one. ~I feel something,~ he said, breaking the silence of their work. ~It's strange -- nebulous --~

~There's nothing about this experience that isn't strange,~ observed Emma, allowing her mind to reach out towards Jim's and assess the information he was drawing out of the stream of minds. And then there was another one, a flitter of warmth and familiarity that drew Emma's attention. She touched on Rachel's mind, gave her what, in a less nebulous place than the Astral Plane, she would have called specifications and reached out again, in a more concentrated search. ~I don't think she's there,~ she sent out as the next mind with that trace drifted out of Cerebro's depths. ~More like - Jean's been there. Brushed against these people when she moved.~ Another mind, a minnow's trail in the ocean, but another step outwards.

If there was one thing that Rachel was familiar with, it was the Astral Plane. She tied herself to Emma like a life line and dove deeper into the flood on the older woman's instructions and pinged up another thought her companions. ~If by nebulous, you mean heavy? Hazy? It's probably buried under something.~ It was followed by a short pause as Rachel rapidly split off a corner of her consciousness and sought out Haller's mind through their shared link to assess his findings. The new sensation washed over her on top of the flood she was floating in. ~Yeah. Like a body of water. But... is that what Jean feels like?~

~No, not normally. Her presence is usually light and distinct -- like this.~ The thought was accompanied by a memory of Jean's usual psi-signature: a bright, core punctuated by the occasional pulse of energy, like a steady flame.

As he was still acclimating to the task Jim had largely allowed himself to be carried in the women's wakes. Now that they were zeroing in on an area, however, he began to feel more comfortable; it was easier to treat the endeavor as a normal search. He settled around the area Rachel was focusing on and began to send out more active feelers, weaving through the other two telepath's minds like searchers performing a grid-sweep. ~This doesn't make sense,~ he remarked. ~We should be picking up her signal before whatever traces she left.~

~I think she's in hiding,~ responded Emma. ~Deep hiding. The Box kind of hiding.~ She paused as she caught another hint of a mind intersected, fed the data into the grid/map/coordinates they were building together. ~But where she's hiding, she had to go there and there were people on the way. We're following her trail. Where she was, not where she is.~

If they were anywhere but where they were, Emma and Haller would probably have sensed Rachel's metaphorical eyeroll and huff. Because they clearly either were not listening to her or had not understood what she meant. But that's okay. ~Then we follow her trail. And she'll be where the trail stops.~

Jim nodded, thinking of the traces and what Rachel had said. Given the quality of the signals they'd been picking up he'd thought she'd been speaking metaphorically, but perhaps . . .

Like a body of water . . .